F for Fake

F for Fake
Directed by
Produced by
  • François Reichenbach
  • Dominique Antoine
  • Richard Drewitt
Written by
  • Orson Welles
  • Oja Kodar
Starring
Music by Michel Legrand
Cinematography
  • François Reichenbach (France)
  • Gary Graver (United States)
Edited by
  • Marie-Sophie Dubus
  • Dominique Engerer
  • Gary Graver (uncredited)
Distributed by Specialty Films
Release dates
 September 25, 1975
Running time
 88 minutes
Country France / Iran / West Germany
Language English / French / Spanish
Box office 182,857 admissions (France)[1]

F for Fake (French: Vérités et mensonges, "Truths and lies") is the last major film completed by Orson Welles, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in the film. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Loosely a documentary, the film operates in several different genres and has been described as a kind of film essay.

Far from serving as a traditional documentary on Elmyr de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, notorious "hoax-biographer" Clifford Irving, and Orson Welles as himself.

In addition to the 88-minute film, in 1976 Welles also shot and edited a self-contained 9-minute short film as a "trailer", almost entirely composed of original material not found in the main film itself.

Plot

Several narratives are woven together throughout the film, including those of de Hory, Irving, Welles, Howard Hughes and Kodar.

About de Hory, we learn that he was a struggling artist who turned to forgery out of desperation, only to see the greater share of the profits from his deceptions go to doubly unscrupulous art dealers. As partial compensation for that injustice, he is maintained in a villa in Ibiza by one of his dealers. What is only hinted at in Welles's documentary is that de Hory had recently served a two-month sentence in a Spanish prison for homosexuality and consorting with criminals. (De Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles' film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities.)

Irving's original part in F for Fake was as de Hory's biographer, but his part grew unexpectedly at some point during production. There has not always been agreement among commentators over just how that production unfolded, but the now-accepted story[2] is that the director François Reichenbach shot a documentary about de Hory and Irving before giving his footage to Welles, who then shot additional footage with Reichenbach as his cinematographer.

In the time between the shooting of Reichenbach's documentary and the finishing of Welles', it became known that Irving had perpetrated a hoax of his own, namely a fabricated "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes (the hoax was later fictionalized in The Hoax). This discovery prompted the shooting of still more footage, which then got woven into F for Fake. Interweaving the narratives even more, there are several pieces of footage in the film showing Welles at a party with De Hory, and, at one point, De Hory even signs a painting with a forgery of Welles' signature. Some of Hughes' career is outlined in the form of a parody of the "News on the March" sequence in Citizen Kane. Welles also draws parallels between the De Hory and Irving hoaxes and his own brush with early notoriety by including a recreation of part of his 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama, which had simulated a newscast about a Martian invasion and sparked panic among some listeners.

Exactly one hour before narrating Kodar's story, Welles promises that everything in the next hour of his film will be true. Exactly one hour later, the film tells a story where Kodar sits for a series of nudes for Pablo Picasso after getting him to agree to give her the finished portraits, and then selling not those very portraits but fake Picassos in their place. The story climaxes with Welles and Kodar re-enacting a tense exchange between Picasso and Kodar's grandfather, the alleged forger of the paintings, before Welles reminds the viewer that he only promised to tell the truth for an hour and that "for the last 17 minutes, I've been lying my head off."

In the commentary to the Criterion Collection DVD release of F for Fake, Kodar claims the idea for this segment as her own. She also claims credit for the movie's opening sequence, which consists of shots of a miniskirt-clad Kodar walking down streets while rubbernecking male admirers (unaware that they are being filmed) stop and openly stare. This sequence is described by Kodar as inspired by her feminism; in his narration, Welles claims the footage was originally shot for an unrelated production.

Cast

Others

Locations

The Donjon de Houdan, seen in the Oja and Picasso story.

Trailer

F for Fake was not released in the USA until 1976. When it finally came out, Welles produced a preview "trailer" for it, which was effectively a wholly original 9-minute film, shot and edited in a similar style to the film itself. Apart from some very brief split-second camera shots, the entire film is a self-contained short containing original material starring Welles, Gary Graver and Oja Kodar. No cinema distributor was willing to show the choppy 9-minute film (that suffered from the fact that it was largely created, starring, shot by, narrated and edited by awkward B-movie cinematographer, Graver). Welles allegedly ran out of money making the film and paid Graver by giving him his Oscar. The dodgy trailer contains even more footage of Welles' muse and girlfriend at the time, the stiffly provocative, yet inexperienced actress/model, Oja, posing with a tiger. The trailer has subsequently been restored in colour, and is included as an extra on some DVD versions of the film.[4]

Reception

F for Fake faced widespread popular rejection. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be self-indulgent and/or incoherent. F for Fake has grown somewhat in stature over the years.[5] In that the film embraces everything from self-conscious notation of the film process to ironic employment of 1950s-era B movie footage, Welles thought he was creating not so much a documentary as a "new kind of film," as he once told writer Jonathan Rosenbaum.[6] F for Fake is now sometimes referred to as a "film essay." It currently holds an 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 36 critics.

Style

According to some reviews, the F for Fake mash-up has possibly paved the way for the modern "attention-deficit" style of editing.[7] More likely, Welles was influenced by those that came before, such as the French New Wave and Dadaist filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard and René Clair who used editing to alternately build and deconstruct. What is unique to the film is the concept of the "unreliable narrator." A key subject of the film itself, which at many points shows Welles sitting at an editing controller, as he narrates and draws self-reflexive attention to the problems with veracity in life and filmmaking.[6] Several filmmakers contributed to the forgery that is "F for Fake" including B-movie cinematographer Gary Graver (who contributes all footage filmed in the U.S., as well as some very choppy editing, and his own voice/image as the dubious on-screen "newscaster") as well as Welles' girlfriend and muse, Oja Kodar (who at one point appears in a series of butt shots as she is ogled both by Welles' camera and by stock footage of males who "see" her). It is in fact a trick of editing and/or creative geography and Welles' first lie in the film, or is it? Who directed these shots? Kodar claims she did. It is unclear where Welles' participation stops and his lesser-known collaborators begins, as the film employs multiple editors, multiple directors, multiple cross cuttings of unrelated footage and the often erratic use of creative geography as well as multiple voice overs. An example of this appears with a series of near wordless shots of Irving and de Hory seemingly in debate as to whether de Hory ever signed his forgeries (the shots of Irving and de Hory were in fact taken at different times).[7]

Welles's autobiographical asides in the film reflect on his 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which caused a nationwide panic with its fake news broadcast. In introducing this chapter of his life, Welles declares his uncertainty as to his own authenticity, as he believes he too has engaged in fraud. Interestingly, while the basic facts of the War of the Worlds incident are correctly given, the apparent excerpts from the play featured in the movie are complete fabrications, including a scene in which President Roosevelt meets the Martian invaders—something which did not happen in the original (fabricated) broadcast.

Questions of truthfulness

Author Robert Anton Wilson, a great fan of the film, argued in Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death that the film was itself largely an intentional effort at fakery by Welles in support of the film's themes. Most directly, Wilson reports that in the BBC documentary Orson Welles: Stories of a Life in Film, Welles stated that "everything in that film was fake." Secondly, many of the interviews in the film were with people who were themselves directly involved with forgery in one way or another, often making statements that would have been known by the filmmakers to be false, but which were allowed to pass without comment in the film. Similarly, Welles himself made numerous false statements about Oja Kodar in the film. Finally, Wilson points out several scenes which, while presented in a way that implies they were filmed in real time, were upon further inspection clearly fabricated from unrelated pieces of footage in a way guaranteed to mislead the casual viewer.

Home-video releases

See also

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Orson Welles box office information in France at Box Office Story
  2. ↑ Childers, Doug (June 21, 2005). "Hanky-Panky Men: Orson Welles' F for Fake". Retrieved February 24, 2010.
  3. ↑ Thieme, Claudia (1997). F for fake, and the growth in complexity of Orson Welles' documentary form. P. Lang. p. 95. ISBN 0-8204-3253-9.
  4. ↑ Gary Graver and Andrew J. Rausch, Making Movies With Orson Welles: A Memoir (Scarecrow Press, New York, 2008) p.170
  5. ↑ Jackson, Ayres. "Orson Welles's: "Complicitous Critique: Postmodern Paradox in F for Fake". Retrieved April 27, 2014.
  6. 1 2 Rosenbaum, Jonathan (April 25, 2005). "Orson Welles's Purloined Letter: F For Fake". Retrieved February 24, 2010.
  7. 1 2 Bromley, Patrick (June 6, 2005). "Review of F For Fake: Criterion Collection". DVD Verdict. Retrieved February 24, 2010.
  8. ↑ Liebenson, David, "Video: 'F for Fake' Joins Orson Welles Rarities". Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1995
  9. ↑ F for Fake at The Criterion Collection
  10. ↑ F for Fake at Madman Entertainment
  11. ↑ F for Fake at Masters of Cinema

External links

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